NA-277-2011-02-10 Credits

Trains Good, Planes BAd (Whoo Hoo!)

Elite$

Bank$ters

2TTH

Haiti

Gitmo Nation

Gitmo Nation Jewelry

Gitmo Nation East

Gitmo Nation Lowlands

Gitmo Nation Brussels Sprouts

United $tates of EURO-pe

Gold

TV & Radio PR

Minstry of Truth

COBOL & Skip Logic

Magic Numbers

Cyber War$

Shut Up Slave!

What color is your revolution?

Devil Weed

Biodiversitˇe

Nap For Humanity

Monsantooo

Vaccine$

Codex Alimentarius

Food!

Salt

No Agenda Books

Out There

Real News

End of Show Clip

Video

Donations

JCD/NZ

 2/5/2011; 12:41:21 PM.   .

According to this article the person who (re)posted a youtube clip from 1994 was fired from his NBC related job. I recall these days quite well, and although it seems hilarious to us today, the concept of the internet took many years for people to grasp. You think Gumbel and Couric fumbling at understanding the @ sign is funny? How about MTV executives who told me they didn't care if I registered mtv.com and ran a Gopher server, because they had already secured their AOL 'keywords'.

Many, many people, myself included, spent years evangelizing the network.

And it wasn't just the non 'techie' people who needed convincing. Another gem in this video is the email address they are trying to parse: violence@nbc.ge.com

IT executives wielded enormous power over their mysterious kingdoms and weren't about to let any 'marketing types' tell them how to run their email systems. If you wanted to receive an email on his network, you just know you're going to be a sub-domain of the mighty ge.com!!

It took equally as long to change the conventional thinking that engineers, sysadmins and developers had at the time. Like how setting up an email alias for todayshow.com was more appropriate for the audience than a convoluted multiple [dot] address of the (now former) parent corporation.

There was even a time, before the web, when you could get banned from a newsgroup (remember those?), possibly ALL newsgroups if you posted a message of 'commercial content'. Exactly what constituted 'commercial' was open to interpretation and even the rules of 'netiquette' didn't last long once the world wide web created the largest marketing opportunity in our lifetime.

So this is a rare moment when I defend the mainstream nest I come from. Looking back we can and should all laugh at ourselves, but also reflect on how much has been accomplished in a relatively short time. Facebooks, Twitters and Googles will come and go. Our generation's job is to continue to protect the network and our access to it, for today and generations to come.

 2/5/2011; 10:30:01 AM.   .